This week, and today especially, is a day to keep perspective; keep the big picture in view at all times, and make sure your greater vision for any projects or situations is guiding your actions. This is sound guidance most days, but today’s astrology, featuring Mercury and Mars (in each other’s signs, incidentally) makes it especially important.
Usually this column is concerned with planets making aspects, but occasionally it’s the lack of aspects being made by a planet that calls for attention. That’s the case by Mars in Virgo right now: it’s not making any major aspects to any major planets.
Superficially, that sounds like no big deal; with some planets, it might not be. But Mars is the planet of drive, action, libido, aggression — it’s an especially energetic archetype, and energy needs to have a conduit or a purpose to be useful rather than chaotic or destructive. Mars not making any aspects means there are no boundaries for its energy; no clear, productive way to engage with it. There’s an element of danger to the situation — though in Virgo (a sign ruled by Mercury) this is more likely to manifest as an obsession with details that never really leads anywhere.
Hence the need to keep perspective and keep one eye on the big picture; the idea is to make sure all the little things you’re fixing actually add up to a sum that’s greater than the parts. You don’t want to step back at some point and realize you’ve chopped and tweaked and snipped things into an inchoate, mushy mess. If Mars in Virgo is a power tool, it’s one to be used with precision — and frequent looks at the blueprints rather than sawing away at everything you can get your hands on.